George Lucas doesn’t need Angelina Jolie to sell The Clone Wars

San Francisco – When George Lucas decided to produce the latest chapter in the Star Wars saga as an animated television series, the idea of using big-name actors was tossed out the window.

“You need people available every week and you can’t really afford multimillion-dollar actors for a television series,” Lucas told a group of reporters at Big Rock Ranch, the headquarters for Lucasfilms’ animation division. “The licence fee on your average television series is about $200 thousand; its nothing. Those guys make more during their coffee break.”

Lucas explained that the three most-recent films’ actors were told that a television show was in the works, but mostly as a courtesy. Then, when it was decided that the television series would be introduced by a feature animated film—Star Wars: The Clone Wars, scheduled for North American release on August 15—the actors were asked if they were interested in lending their voices; some of them said yes and others were busy.

Samuel L. Jackson made himself available to provide the voice of Jedi Mace Windu, Anthony Daniels returns as the voice of C-3PO, and Tom Kane and Christopher Lee take up their roles as Yoda and Count Dooku. But these characters are relatively minor and the films’ leads mostly decided to sit The Clone Wars out.

The voice of Anakin Skywalker is provided by Matt Lanter, Obi-Wan Kenobi’s is provided by James Arnold Taylor, and Queen Amidala is voiced by Catherine Taber.

Since 1995’s Toy Story saw Tom Hanks provide the voice for Woody, many animated films have paid big bucks for Hollywood brand names. The cast of 2001’s Shrek included Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, and Cameron Diaz; while John Goodman and Billy Crystal lent their voices to Monsters Inc. More recently, Kung Fu Panda featured an all-star cast that included Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Jackie Chan, Seth Rogen, Lucy Liu, and Angelina Jolie.

Lucas argued that such big names were hired as much for their star power as they were for their talent.

“To be very honest with you, as much as I love you guys,” Lucas said, referring to the press, “I don’t really think I need to hire an actor, a big movie star, to go out and publicize my movie.”

Lucas continued, “They [actors] have two days in the studio or three days in the studio and then they have two weeks doing press. So they are mainly paid for the press stuff; they’re not really paid for doing the movie.”